How Can You Use Facebook’s New “Reactions” Emoji for Meetings?

Full disclosure: I am not an emoji person. When I get a text that’s all

I just don’t get what they add to the message. Sometimes I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly the person meant by that unicorn/triple heart/palm tree next to a message about meeting for coffee. The few times I have used them, it’s always been sarcastically. The English major in me can't help herself. (Although, weirdly, I like an occasional emoticon, but that's another story ;>)

So the news that Facebook was adding a bunch of emoji “Reactions” to its thumbs-up “like” button did not make my heart go pitter-patter. I mean, if something deserves more than a mindless “like” of an acknowledgement, people should just write a message expressing sadness, or joy, or astonishment, or whatever, right? I’m trying to imagine expressing sadness for someone’s loss with this guy

That just seems wrong to me. But what do I know?

Of course, Facebook didn’t just add emoji because people have a dire need to emoji-fy everything—although we do seem to be heading in that direction. Facebook is all about data collection, and the Reactions addition is also a fairly brilliant, more nuanced way to generate data about how people react to various things they see on the site, one that’s much easier to track and crunch and draw conclusions from than human-to-human written messages.

And you can use that for your meetings, even if you’re a curmudgeonly emoji-denier like me. If something posted to your organization’s Facebook page gets a lot of these bad boys

Well, you’ve got yourself a great general session hot topic, don’t you? If a post generates a lot of

for the person who wrote it, you may have yourself a great potential speaker.

Et cetera.

So I will try to think of these cartoony emotional stand-ins as data tools for meetings improvement, and not further signs of the sad slide of humanity’s ability to express emotions through the written word.